Etymologies

(American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

An Italian variant of coboletta, diminutive of cobola ("stanza, couplet"), from Old Provençal cobla, from Latin copula. (Wiktionary)

Examples

Her observations about art are generally trite and when she does say something more specific, such as "an aria without a cabaletta is like sex without an orgasm", one is more stunned by the apercu's vulgarity than its accuracy.

Our natural instinct is to analyze that as a homologous variation — Joplin must have got it from somewhere, perhaps the cavatina-cabaletta sequence of Italian opera, or perhaps Rossini overtures, or perhaps similarly obsessive passages in Chopin or Schumann.

It's the prime masterpiece of the period where Verdi went from a talented master of the Italian operatic tradition to a genius of reinvention: Verdi saw that the conventions of bel canto — the coloratura decoration, the steady build from recitative to cavatina to cabaletta, the diagetic justification for dance and popular music — had matured to the point that their mere presence could have dramatic content above and beyond the story.

The invention of the cabaletta, or quick movement, following the cavatina or slow movement, must be ascribed to him, an innovation which has affected the form of opera, German and French, as well as Italian, throughout this century.